What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (5 page)

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

 

sleep in an old ranch house in the Hill Country with a shotgun under my bed and a cat on my head. The cat's name is Lady Argyle, and she used to belong to my mother before Mom stepped on a rainbow. It is not a pleasant situation when you have a cat who insists on sleeping on your head like a hat and putting her whiskers in your left nostril all night long at intervals of about twenty-seven minutes. I haven't actually timed this behavioral pattern, but it wouldn't surprise me if the intervals were precisely twenty-seven minutes. This precarious set of affairs could have easily resulted in a hostage situation or a suicide pact, but as of this writing, neither has occurred. The two reasons are because I love Lady as much as a man is capable of loving a cat, and Lady loves me as much as a cat is capable of loving a man. It is a blessing when an independent spirit like a cat loves you, and it's a common human failing to underestimate or trivialize such a bond. On the other hand, it's not a healthy thing to observe a man going to bed with a cat on his head like a hat. And, in the case of Lady and myself, there
are
observers.

The observers of this van Gogh mental hospital scenario are four dogs, all of whom despise Lady—though not half as much as Lady despises them. The dogs sleep on the bed, too, and they find it unnerving, not to say unpleasant, to be in the presence of a man who has a cat on his head. I've tried to discuss this with them on innumerable occasions, but it isn't easy to state your case to four dogs who are looking at you with pity in their eyes.

Mr. Magoo is five years old and highly skilled at how to be resigned to a sorry situation. He's a deadbeat dad, so his two sons, Brownie and Chumley, are with us as well. Brownie and Chumley were so named after my sister Marcie's two imaginary childhood friends and fairly recently have been left in my care, as she departed for Vietnam with the International Red Cross, an assignment she correctly deduced might be harmful to the health, education, and welfare of Brownie and Chumley. The animals divide their time between my place and the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch, a sanctuary for abused and stray animals. (It's run by Nancy Parker and Tony Simons; my role is the Gandhilike figure. For more information go to utopiarescue.com).

If you've been spiritually deprived as a child and are not an animal lover, you may already be in a coma from reading this. That's good because I don't care a flea about people who don't love animals. I shall continue my impassioned tale, and I shall not stop until the last dog is sleeping.

The last dog is Hank. He looks like one of the flying monkeys in
The Wizard of Oz,
and he doesn't understand that the cat can and will hurt him and me and the entire Polish Army if we get in her way. Lady is about eighteen years old and has lived in this house on this ranch almost all her life, and she doesn't need to be growled at by a little dog with a death wish.

So I've got the cat hanging down over one side of my face like a purring stalactite with her whiskers poking into my left nostril and Hank on the other side who completely fails to grasp the mortal danger he's placing both of us in by playfully provoking the cat. It's 3:09 in the morning, and suddenly a deafening cacophony of barking, hissing, and shrieking erupts, with Lady taking a murderous swat at Hank directly across my fluttering eyelids and Mr. Magoo stepping heavily on my slumbering scrotum as all of the animals bolt off the bed simultaneously. This invariably signals the arrival of Dilly, my pet armadillo.

Dilly has been showing up with the punctuality of a German train in my backyard for years. I feed him cat food, dog food, bacon grease, anything. He is a shy, crepuscular, oddly Christlike creature whose arrival brings a measure of comfort to me at the same time it causes all of the dogs to go into attack mode. It is not really necessary to describe what effect this always has on Lady.

After I've slipped outside and fed Dilly, I gather the animals about me like little pieces of my soul. I explain to them once

again that Dilly is an old, spiritual friend of mine who is cursed with living in a state full of loud, brash Texans, and we don't have to make things worse. Somewhere there is a planet, I tell them, paraphrasing the great John D. MacDonald, inhabited principally by sentient armadillos who occasionally carve up dead humans and sell them as baskets by the roadside. Perhaps not surprisingly, the animals seem to relate to this peculiar vision. Then we all go back to bed and dream of fields full of slow-moving rabbits and mice and cowboys and Indians and imaginary childhood friends and tail fins on Cadillacs and girls in the summertime and everything else that time has taken away.

I DON'T

y fairy godmother, Edythe Kruger Friedman, is always telling me I should get married. As the survivor of two happy marriages—the last one to my father— she believes that a man and a woman living together in marital bliss is the only way to find true contentment in life. I believe in a neck without a pain.

Edythe feels so strongly about the importance of marriage and I feel so strongly about the importance of the freedom to wander in the raw poetry of time that often, when I go to her house for breakfast, we get into contentious little arguments on the subject. The debate sometimes becomes so heated that, if you happened to be listening from another room, you might assume that we were married. We are not, of course. I'll never be married. In fact, whenever I'm in Hawaii or Las Vegas or someplace where I happen to pass by a wedding in progress, I never fail to shout, "Stop before it's too late!"

It's already too late for me. I tell this to Edythe, but she never listens. I explain to her that I'm too old and set in my ways. I'm fifty-eight, though I read at the sixty-year-old level. And just because I'm fifty-eight and I've never been married, I tell her, does not mean I'm gay. It's only one red flag.

But don't you ever want to have a family? Edythe asks, pronouncing the word "family" with a soft reverence, as if it's the most wonderful state of being in the world. Have you ever seen
American Beauty?
I ask her. Families are only acquisition-mergers to create more and more of what there's already more than enough of as it is. It's just a rather narrow, selfish way of creating many little Edythes and many little Kinkys running around taking Ritalin and Prozac, playing video games, saying "awesome," sucking out all the money, energy, and time from your adult life, and growing up with an ever-increasing possibility of becoming the Unabomber. No thanks.

What I don't tell Edythe is that I already have a family. I have four dogs, four women, and four editors. This may seem like an unconventional arrangement to most people, but it does have at least one advantage over a traditional family. I don't have to find schools for them.

Speaking of school-age kids, another thing I don't tell Edythe is that I'm not really in the market for a fifty-eight-year-old belly dancer. I find myself going out with younger and younger women, most of whom happen to be from Dallas and can't remember where they were when JFK was assassinated, because they weren't born yet. Some of them, in fact, would not be born until several decades later, and they think JFK is an airport, RFK is a stadium, and Martin Luther King is a street running through their town.

"What could you two possibly have to talk about?" my fellow senior citizens often ask. It's true that the only time we ever find common ground is on her futon. She's never heard of Jack Benny, Humphrey Bogart, or Abbie Hoffman, and she thinks Hitler may have been a punk band in the early eighties. We get along fairly well, because I don't remember much, either.

There are two kinds of people in this world, I've always believed. I'm the kind who wants to sleep late and belch loudly and sometimes quite humorously at dinner parties. There are times, undoubtedly, when I feel alone, but I've found that it's always better to feel alone alone than to have that empty, soul-destroying feeling of feeling alone with somebody else. True happiness, I often tell people, must come from within. People don't always like to hear me espouse this great wisdom, but they do seem to prefer it to my belching at dinner parties.

The other kind of person, the polar opposite of myself, is what I like to call the marrying kind. I have three friends who, between them, have been married a dozen times, and I'm betting they're not through yet. Their names are Willie Nelson, Robert Duvall, and Billy Bob Thornton. All three tell me that they still believe in the institution of marriage, especially if it doesn't drive them to the mental institution. I think we're all probably creatures of habit, and the three of them just like being married. Or, possibly, after a failed marriage, the cowboy in them wants to get on that horse again to show he can still ride. A shrink might say they are repetitive neurotics. A shrink might also say that I have a fear of commitment. I would, of course, tell the shrink that I don't have a fear of commitment. I'm just afraid that someday my future ex-wife might not understand me. Then I would tell the shrink I want my money back.

Edythe, however, is oblivious to my protestations and my intransigence. She has a way of approaching the subject from many angles. Don't you ever want to be happy? she sometimes asks. No, I tell her. I don't want to be happy. Happiness is a highly perishable and transitory state, and it doesn't have a balanced export arrangement from one person to another, not to mention

that the import tax is too high. Besides, I'm concerned that happiness may have a negative effect on my writing.

Maybe you could write about meeting a nice Jewish girl, my fairy godmother suggests. I've met a lot of nice Jewish girls, I tell her, and they all seem to me to be culturally deprived. They all grew up in this country, yet most of them appear to have never heard the three words that Americans have come to live by.

"I love you?" asks Edythe.

"No," I tell her. "Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers."

Edythe usually continues nattering on until she finally broadsides me with her famous "right person" ploy. Maybe you just haven't found the right person yet, she says. I don't mention it, but I've already found the right person. Unfortunately, she was Miss Fire Ant, 1967. Things went downhill from there, both of us got our feelers hurt, and she wound up putting the bite on me.

The conversation usually concludes with Edythe employing what I call the "true love gambit." Don't I believe in true love? Haven't I ever been in true love? Of course I believe in it, I tell her. I've been in true love many times. I just try to avoid it as much as possible. For if there's one thing I know about true love, it is that sooner or later, it results in a hostage situation. Don't get me wrong: I'm not against marriage. I'm against my marriage. Anyway, I'm rather busy now. It's time to let the dogs in and the editors out. As for the women, that really isn't necessary. They have their own inexorable methods of working their way into your heart.